Clearly the Medina Muslim group tends to favor a supposed return to the imagined medieval past. But the Mecca Muslim group does not favor this supposed return. Instead, they are trying to cope with modernity to the best of their abilities, while remaining faithful Muslims to the best of their abilities.
As noted, the Roman Catholic Church has a hierarchical top-down governance structure. The timid Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope, has publicly declared that ordination of women to be priests is a closed issue as far as he is concerned.
Nevertheless, I want to point out here that the Jesuits typically represent rational and individualistic values of modernity, but not necessarily the secular values, or at least not all of those values. You see, as Garry Wills recounts in his book THE FUTURE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH WITH POPE FRANCIS (2015), mentioned above, the American Jesuit priest and theologian John Courtney Murray emerged as the most significant force behind the Second Vatican Council's ruling in favor of freedom of religion -- a famous American political right.
As the example of contemporary Jesuits shows, they are able to live religiously faithful lives in the Roman Catholic Church with its outdated sexual morality. So contemporary Muslims should be able to live religiously faithful lives in the Islamic religious tradition, even in the midst of the challenges of modernity.
Nevertheless, it would be wonderful if contemporary Muslims could bring themselves to endorse freedom of religion and the separation of church and state.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali suggests five correctives that she thinks are needed in Islam today.
Her first suggestion centers on Muhammad's supposed semi-divine status and the literal interpretation of the Islamic sacred texts. She sees Muhammad "as a historical figure who united the Arab tribes in a pre-modern context that cannot be replicated in the 21st century." She claims that Islam's sacred scripture "was shaped by human hands." As a result, large parts, she says, "simply reflect the tribal values of the 7th-century Arabian context." Nevertheless, she claims that certain spiritual values in the Islamic sacred literature have enduring spiritual values, despite the cultural accidents of place and time in other aspects of the sacred literature.
I would point out that many Christians today still claim that the historical Jesus was supposed divine. In addition, many fundamentalist Protestants today still hold the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali's second suggestion focuses on the supposed supremacy of life after death. She claims that this supposed supremacy fuels martyrdom, because of the supposed benefits accruing to martyrs in the afterlife.
Of course the spirit of martyrdom is also found in Christianity. Candida Moss of the university of Notre Dame has published a candid study of this Christian tradition: THE MYTH OF PERSECUTION: HOW EARLY CHRISTIANS INVENTED A STORY OF MARTYRDOM (2013). For further information about early Christian history, see James J. O'Donnell's new book PAGANS: THE END OF TRADITIONAL RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY (2015).
Ayaan Hirsi Ali's third suggestion centers on the vast body of Islamic religious legislation known as Shariah. She is blunt: "Muslims should learn to put the dynamic, evolving laws made by human beings above those aspects of Shariah that are violent, intolerant or anachronistic.
The parallel to Shariah in the Roman Catholic Church involves what is known as the Catholic natural-law moral theory. This tradition of moral theory informs the church's outdated doctrines of sexual morality.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali's fourth suggestions centers on the so-called right of individual Muslims to enforce Islamic law. She is again blunt: "There is no room in the modern world for religious, police, vigilantes and politically empowered clerics."
Today in the United States, we are still working to review laws on the books that were inspired in the past by certain Christian moral doctrines.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali's fifth suggestion centers on the supposed imperative to wage jihad, or holy war. She unequivocally denounces this centuries-old tradition.
The Christian tradition of thought does not exactly contain an explicit counterpart to supposed imperative to wage holy war. But of course the absence of an explicit counterpart to wage holy war has not stopped Christians from waging holy wars, including holy wars in which Catholics and Protestants killed one another in favor of their own religious beliefs.
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